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Volumes to Last for Centuries

The Colonial Williamsburg bookbindery near the Print
Shop and Post Office in the Historic Area produces books one at a time. Books were expensive in the eighteenth century, and few could afford many.

America is awash in books. Every year, publishers flood stores large and
small with hundreds of thousands of titles, works that join millions more
already in bookcases and on library shelves. The Internet offers billions of
bytes of hard-drive-choking tomes with a few clicks of a mouse. Hardback,
paperback, digital, books are common, plentiful, and cheap. That has not always
been so. As you learn at Colonial Williamsburg's bookbindery, in the 1700s,
books were relatively rare and precious.

Generally speaking,
in eighteenth-century America books were upper-middle- and upper-class
indulgences. Thomas Jefferson collected 6,500 volumes. They became the core of
the Library of Congress. But most readers contented themselves with a few
works.

"Books were
considered treasures," Master Bookbinder Bruce Plumley said. "A shelf could be
called a library, and that single shelf could represent a large outlay. Books
were status symbols. They showed that you were wealthy and educated."

Raw materials—paper
and leather for covers—were expensive. Without machinery, production was
relatively slow. Putting together a simple business ledger might take about
thirty steps and twelve to twenty hours, depending on the item's size. But the
time and work it took to make a book turned the linen rags from which paper was
made and the hides used for covers into treasures. Craftsmen could create
bindings of remarkable quality, books to last centuries.

Plumley and journeymen Dale Dippre and James Townsend
keep alive the tradition of first-class bindery workmanship at Colonial
Williamsburg. They not only make business ledgers and account books but also
create some bindings that incorporate fine leathers, gold leaf, and decorative
metal work.

Journeyman Dale Dippre

Master Bookbinder Bruce Plumley

Journeyman James Townsend.

Plumley learned the
craft as a young man in England during the 1950s. He studied under Eric Burdett,
an internationally recognized master. Plumley, too, has enjoyed global success.
He has two Thomas Harrison Memorial Awards, which recognize outstanding
bookbinding, and is a Fellow of Designer Bookbinding—a title bestowed on
twenty-one people in the world.

He is also a book restorer and conservator who has
worked on antique volumes, including two Gutenberg Bibles and books owned by
British naval hero Lord Nelson.

During the eighteenth century, engineering-like skills and knowledge were required to make books
strong and durable. A book's structure had to allow for repeated openings and
closings, page fanning and tugging, falls to the floor, and being pulled from a
shelf by a finger hooked on a spine. Covers required artistry.

In the 1700s, young men learned bookbinding through an
apprenticeship. It usually began in their teenage years and ended in their
twenties. Mastering the trade required hard work, dexterity, attention to
detail, and a willingness and ability to handle painstaking tasks. By the time
they became journeymen, apprentices had learned dozens of skills, including
folding pages, collating them, stitching, gluing, and techniques for decorating
covers.

Book assembly was
like constructing a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Once the pages had come from the printer's, in the broadest terms, the
process had two steps: forwarding and finishing. Forwarding generally involved
arranging pages so they could be turned and examined. The most obvious work at
this stage included arranging the pages in order and stitching them together.
Townsend said stitching is one of bookbinding's easiest skills to master. It
also is the essence of the craft. Once the pages were connected, the bookbinder
put a protective cover on them, typically fashioned of leather from calves,
sheep, or deer. The pages, folded in closed signatures, had to be cut open.

Finishing involved
decoration. It could include lettering as well as design work. Bookbinders used
heated tools to stamp or imprint a design in the leather. Eighteenth-century
English decoration tended to be restrained. French work was more flamboyant.
Colonial Williamsburg's bookbinders say that decorating books with gold leaf,
twenty-four-karat gold sheets that are 250,000th of an inch thick, is the most
demanding task. Among the variables are the heat of the tools, the type of
cover, and the space allotted for a title on a spine. Everything is done by
hand without benefit of a template.

"The last thing you
do is the tooling, and it can make or break the project," Townsend said. "Gold
tooling is ferociously difficult. But there's no doubt about it that when
you're done with it, nothing looks as good as a gold-encrusted book."

Like most American
craftsmen in the 1700s, colonial bookbinders tended to be generalists. In Great
Britain, the trade could be far more specialized. Large shops in major cities
could afford craftsmen who focused on one aspect of production. According to
Plumley, a few bookbinders, like Samuel Mearne and Roger Payne, established
reputations for skill that remain solid in the twenty-first century.

Bookbinders with high skills, working in the right shop, could expect satisfying jobs and pay.
Williamsburg was an excellent location for a bindery. The Virginia colony's
government needed documents bound. Teachers and students at the College of
William and Mary wanted books. Planters, tradesmen, churches, ship captains,
lawyers, and doctors needed account and ledger books. Printer William Parkes
employed binders and kept them busy.

Their vocational
successors Plumley, Dippre, and Townsend demonstrate a complex, detailed trade
unlike any labor the average visitor encounters in today's world. The
bookbinders say there is nothing else they would rather do.

"I love the work,"
Dippre said. "It definitely has a creative side to it. Like all work, it can be
mundane, but we get enough variety and high-end projects that it's engaging and
fun."

Ed Crews
contributed to the spring 2005 journal an article on agriculture at Colonial
Williamsburg.